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Thursday, February 24, 2011

Brisbane

Here we are in Brisbane at Jen's house. Jen is Caryn's friend from grade 4 and a wonderful host! Here are the highlights:

Being in a house: although the Art's Factory pentagon-yurt thing was lovely, there are considerably fewer stumbling pentagon-mates here. A house is handy: Caryn has already baked and we are all up on this internet thing, planning away.

Koala Sanctuary: as cute as it sounds. Even cuter than Byron Bay's Institute of Cute. Man, I am getting schooled on cute with Caryn George around. The zoo had 130 happy koalas, many mostly-happy-seeming other animals and great little 15 min talks. We went to the talks on koalas (TOUCHED ONE!), birds of prey (SWOOPING AT OUR HEADS!), sheep hearding (DOGS RUNNING ON SHEEPS BACKS!), and platapuses (SHOOT VENOM FROM THEIR FEET!).

Eating out: Jen sure knows how to find a good place to eat! An Indian place, Sushi Train with a little round treadmill of goodness circling the tables, the Bunker (a converted old bomb shelter mini coffee house), Comfort (more cuteness), local fish and chips, and Thai Terrace.

Botanical Gardens: A tree walk for Ali! It was lead by a lovely middle aged woman who kept losing trees since her route had been disrupted by flood clean-up crews.

Future plans include heading up to Cairns Sunday to dive. Then we fly down to Sydney. After that yes, we are going to New Zealand. Yes, our flight goes into Christchurch first. Not to worry, we'll be sure to change our flights or hop a local flight to another town.

Love you!

Byron Bay, walk up to the lighthouse

Feeding the lorikeets

Alison, looking tres cute, with kangaroo, looking tres cute

possum

It would have cost $32 to get pictures with the real live koalas (say whAt!?!), so we decided to do our own photo shoot in the gift shop. This one really liked me.

Oh wow cute. I was just writing about the word "Australian" in an essay. Denominal adjectives denoting origins, don't ya know. The abyss of grammar is really uncute and so these photos were delightful. I'm glad to see Caryn is befriending the birds of prey. Also: nice hat Ali.